ELISL: early-late integrated synthetic lethality prediction in cancer

ELISL: early-late integrated synthetic lethality prediction in cancer

Tepeli, Y.I. (TU Delft Pattern Recognition and Bioinformatics)
Seale, C.F. (TU Delft Pattern Recognition and Bioinformatics)
P. Gonçalves, Joana (TU Delft Pattern Recognition and Bioinformatics)

2023

Motivation

Anti-cancer therapies based on synthetic lethality (SL) exploit tumour vulnerabilities for treatment with reduced side effects, by targeting a gene that is jointly essential with another whose function is lost. Computational prediction is key to expedite SL screening, yet existing methods are vulnerable to prevalent selection bias in SL data and reliant on cancer or tissue type-specific omics, which can be scarce. Notably, sequence similarity remains underexplored as a proxy for related gene function and joint essentiality.
Results

We propose ELISL, Early–Late Integrated SL prediction with forest ensembles, using context-free protein sequence embeddings and context-specific omics from cell lines and tissue. Across eight cancer types, ELISL showed superior robustness to selection bias and recovery of known SL genes, as well as promising cross-cancer predictions. Co-occurring mutations in a BRCA gene and ELISL-predicted pairs from the HH, FGF, WNT, or NEIL gene families were associated with longer patient survival times, revealing therapeutic potential.

machine learning
selection bias
synthetic lethality
sequence embedding
random forest
patient survival
cancer

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:2ea6923f-5506-4e8d-9d06-9a3b62536d66

1367-4803

Bioinformatics, 40 (1)

Institutional Repository

journal article

© 2023 Y.I. Tepeli, C.F. Seale, Joana P. Gonçalves